China has broken its promise to guarantee freedoms to Hong Kong, said former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as Hongkongers were banned from commemorating the 32nd anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown at Victoria Park.

In a two-minute video posted on Twitter on Saturday, Pompeo described how the city was a “bastion of liberty,” and the only place of China’s sovereign domain for the past three decades where people could freely commemorate those who had died fighting for democracy on June 4, 1989.

“Yet now, the same regime that committed the massacre in Tiananmen Square has broken its promises to Hong Kong,” Pompeo said. “The fundamental freedoms and autonomy that Beijing was promised to guarantee to you, it took away from you.”The candlelight vigil was banned by police for a second straight year, citing precautions against COVID-19 despite the number of new infections having dwindled in the past months. Critics see it as a sign of Beijing’s tightening grip on the city, while authorities’ use of a sweeping national security law has sparked concerns that it is being used to silence dissent.

Being able to use the national security law to punish those who commemorate the crackdown is a “dark reminder that the regime in Beijing still refuses to respect the rights of its own people,” said Pompeo.He praised the “courageous work” of Hongkongers’ fight for freedoms, naming imprisoned Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai and Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee as “heroes.”

In a separate statement, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged people to continue to speak out against China’s “appalling human rights record.”

“The international community must continue to speak out strongly, with one voice, in defense of all persecuted by Beijing: the Tibetans, whose religion, culture and language Beijing is brutally trying to erase; the people of Hong Kong, whose basic rights are crushed daily; the Uyghurs, subject to a campaign of genocide; and the countless innocent human rights activists languishing in prison cells on the mainland,” Pelosi said in a statement dated June 3.

She also made a repeated call for a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympic Games, which Beijing will host in 2022, saying that any silence “enables China’s abuses.”

“The world cannot proceed as if there is nothing wrong with holding the Olympics in a country perpetrating genocide and committing mass human rights violations,” she said.

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